CAPTAIN'S LOGSTARSHIP ENTERPRISENCC-1701-B (C&C 37+)

A running Captain's Log of the sailing and racing yacht "Starship Enterprise"

Chief Science Officer's Log: Stardate 11235.9Lt. Kurt vonRoeschlaub recording
With the captain away on shore leave for some sort of Earth ritual called "Honeymoon," it was up to First Officer Captain Dave, Ensign Emily and myself to represent the ship on the committee boat for the first race. This marks the second year in a row we have done this, which suggests the captain is actively avoiding this duty. This time he chose to get married rather than record racing times.

Eben, EBYRA's PRO, had already arrived first, and docked the committee boat at the club before I arrived. Dave and Emily arrived and we left on a simple preliminary mission: find the Starship Enterprise mooring and make sure it still exists. Realizing that I only had a general idea of the location, I asked Captain Dave if he knew what the mooring number was. "It's the one next to Tolo," he said. Great. Too bad Tolo was still on land.

The search pattern seemed to include everywhere that the mooring was not, and eventually (and wisely) Eben gave up and took the boat to the starting line. The wind was just enough to start the race, so a short course was set and the starting sequence ran smoothly. Soon after the last division passed, a 90 degree windshift turned the race into a broad reach. Fortunately, everyone had tacked by the time that happened, so we let it go. By the end of the race it was practically a second upwind leg anyway.

While the fog settled in and we waited for the returning ships, dinners were cracked open. I had been more than a little rushed out of the house, and just tossed some things in a grocery bag. As a result, my dinner consisted of a can of vanilla coke, a can of peaches, and an entire package of rice cakes (lightly salted). I felt like I was back in college (Starfleet Academy) with that meal.

The race ended with the boats looming from the fog like boats, uh, looming from the fog. Sorry, but there aren't a lot of analogous metaphors here (Captain's Edit: Did Kurt already forget about Khan's USS Reliant hidden in the Mutara Nebula?). The nearly dead winds made the finish entirely unexciting, but it was more than made up for on the return trip as David and Eben fought over the steering. They seemed to have very different opinions about what defines "too close" to a moored boat. With the linked wheels of the fly bridge and cabin being out of hearing range of each other, their main mode of sharing ideas involved yanking firmly, a method of communication that tends to favor the guy who grew up on a farm.

All in all an uneventful start to the racing year, the preferable result when doing race committee, upset only by the failure of the secondary mission.